By Nathan Guma
It is afternoon and Cecelia Kalinje (33), a mother of four from Hopley, a settlement some 13 kilometres from Harare’s central business district, is playing with her one-year-and-ten-month-old baby Trinity as she recites the number line.
“She does not go to school,” Kalinje says. “I think she is intelligent because she has grasped the number line and other school material from people she spends time with.
I hope that one day she will go to school. You never know, she may be a doctor or something.”
However, Trinity’s future is hazy as inconsistencies in the legal framework have deemed her mother Cecelia stateless, which means she cannot access her national identity documentation.
In international law, a stateless person is not considered a national by any state under the operation of its law, and in other cases may be a refugee.
However, not all refugees are stateless, and many stateless people have never crossed an international border.
According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), statelessness may occur for a variety of reasons, including discrimination against particular ethnic or religious groups or based on gender; the emergence of new States and transfers between existing States; and conflict of nationality laws.
Cecelia became stateless when her parents passed away without getting her national identification documents.
“I came to Hopley in 2005. We initially lived at Porta Farm, before our settlement got demolished. So we settled in Hopley as squatters,” she Gemnation.
While she got married, she says her marriage collapsed, with her husband giving up after sending large amounts of money trying to get her documentation, but in vain.
“I got married, with whom I have four children without. But because I do not have identification, we were constantly at loggerheads and he left and remarried,” she said. “He still comes to see the family, but he spends more time with the other wife.
He even has a young child, who has a birth certificate and others, that my children do not have. So that’s the main problem.”
“I cannot do anything. There are also plans to evict people without national identification from Hopley. The lady who had helped me is old and does not live here.
My other sister who had also helped me settle passed on. We could not get her death certificate since we do not have documentation.”
She fears her son Munyaradzi, a Form Three student, may be barred from writing exams as he, too, is one of her four children without a birth certificate.
“My eldest child wrote is in Form 3. He wrote his Grade seven in Mhondoro, but could not collect his certificate since he has no ID. So, the problem is how he will write his ordinary levels. I wish to get a job as I have a big family. For now, I have been fetching water for people for a living,” she says.
Her situation has worsened as she cannot be registered in Malawi as she has been absent from the country beyond the prescribed limit.
Section 25 (5) of the Malawi Citizenship Act Chapter 15:01 says that a person can be deprived of citizenship if the person ‘has been ordinarily resident outside Malawi for a continuous period of seven years and during that period has not registered annuall in the prescribed manner with a Malawi diplomatic or consular office abroad, or has not notified the Minister in writing of his intention to retain his citizenship of Malawi’.
Many other people are enduring Cecelia’s fate.
While research has pegged the figure at over 300 000, the number of stateless people in Zimbabwe remains unknown and has been based on estimates.
According to Amnesty International, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from neighbouring countries who were brought in by colonial authorities to work on farms and mines around the country from Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia, and their descendants who settled or were born in Zimbabwe before independence in 1980 face barriers to acquiring citizenship in the country and have effectively been rendered stateless.
In addition, generations of ethnic Ndebele people, who largely settled in the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces, whose families were killed or disappeared during the Gukurahundi massacres, in the early to mid-1980s, have also been affected by statelessness.
During this period and its aftermath, thousands of people died, lost family members and were forced to flee their homes in the affected areas in Matabeleland and the Midlands.
Many inevitably lost their identity documents, and as a result, those born in the ensuing months and years were unable to be registered because they could not provide the death certificates of their parents required to prove Zimbabwean nationality, thereby rendering them stateless.
“The government’s failure over many years to remove the administrative obstacles to the enjoyment of these rights, particularly to descendants of migrants who migrated to Zimbabwe before independence and to victims of Gukurahundi and their descendants, has forced people into daily struggles to live freely. As a consequence, these two groups of the population have been pushed to the margins of society,” reads a report by Amnesty International titled; “We are like ‘stray animals’.”
Weak laws
Lucy Chivasa. Amnesty International Zimbabwe’s campaigns officer says the failure by the government to align the primary legal framework to the national constitution has made it difficult for people rendered statelessness to benefit from the national registration blitz organised by the government of Zimbabwe, particularly ahead of the 2023 general election.
For instance, while Section 43 of the Constitution provides that every person who was born in Zimbabwe before the publication the 2013 Constitution is a Zimbabwean citizen by birth, some people born to foreign parents without documentation are not considered citizens.
“So basically, when we say a person is stateless, the laws of that country are not recognizing you as a citizen. So, even if we have mobile registration of IDs, or decentralization like what happened in 2022, if someone is stateless, it means they cannot be registered,” she told Gemnation.
“For example, if someone is coming from any Sadc country and they no longer have proof of where they are coming from, they are failing to register because the births and deaths registration and also the Citizenship Act have requirements that have not been aligned to the constitution of 2013, that says that a person born in Zimbabwe is automatically a citizen.”
She said some of the requirements for people to get national identification documents have made the process long and cumbersome which has seen more people giving up.
“For example, someone is required to bring their relative who can attest to the fact that they were born in Zimbabwe, yet they do not have relatives in Zimbabwe. For example, someone came here to Harare when they were born in Darwendale then their father got back to Malawi when he was sick, and then he passed away,” she said.
“They do not know where to go when they go to Malawi, but they remain stateless because the law does not recognize them. It does not allow them, even when there is decentralization to register. So, that is why we are saying stateless people still face challenges to get registration as long as the law does not allow them to do so.
“So, that is a major challenge that they have. So as Amnesty International Zimbabwe, we are calling on the government to align the constitution with the primary legislation so that people can get documentation. During our research, we also found out that there are requirements that are very cumbersome when applying for identification.”
Another lawyer, Dr. Tarisai Mutangi said that inconsistencies in the laws has made it difficult for stateless people to be considered citizens.
In his presentation at a workshop on statelessness by Amnesty International, he said that while the constitution lays out requirements by which a person can become a citizen, primary legislation has been in disharmony.
For instance, while the Births/Deaths Registration Act requires registration of birth within 42 days and criminalises late or non-registration, descendants of deceased migrants may find it hard to prove relations to their parents, especially if they were undocumented.
Contacted for comment, home affairs minister Kazembe Kazembe said he would engage the Registrar-general to find ways in which they could assist.
“I was not aware that we have issues in those areas. Will engage the RG (Registrar General) and look into the issue to find ways to assist,” he told Gemnation.
In May last year, at least 100 000 people were issued national identity cards in the first three weeks of a government mobile registration blitz allowing them to participate in electoral processes.
This saw 103 992 birth certificates, 96 491 IDs and 2 762 death certificates being issued.
A total of 51 687 males were given birth certificates and 52 305 females, while 48 706 males received IDs and 47 785 females, while death certificates were issued to 1 106 males and 1 153 females
For Kalinje, who could not benefit from these blitzes, getting documentation is a dream she has yet to live.
“I wish to get an ID, get a job and work in a company so I can fend for my family and that of my deceased sister,” she says.
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